Catching Up, pt. 4

To make up for lost time, here are some of my favorite explores. I guess this will catch you up to speed:

Hydrotherapy Hospital,

After a great three days in Massachusetts visiting a certain group of friends at a certain large house, I was traveling southbound with an interesting fellow named Roland. We had planned to make a stop on our travels home to see an impressive hallway and an awesome set of tubs. Hydrotherapy Hospital was only a few hours away!

Some of the hospital’s most interesting features were contained within it’s architecture. The later addition of air conditioning ducts seems like an odd afterthought to not consider when drawing up the plans. Each hallway found in the patient wards featured a free hanging ductwork that fed into a slot located at the top of each patient door where the AC and heating would be pumped in. The rooms were surprisingly small, and contained a single window with a steel screen; no lighting fixtures, no toilet, no carpet. A stark contrast from the modern amenities found in today’s hospitals.

Per the usual there was a new and old section to the hospital. The original section had seen much better days. Most of the upper floors had begun to collapse and provided an interesting opportunity to navigate through it. When water and time combine, amazing things happen:

While trying to get from one of the upper collapsing rooms to the other I stumbled across the only graffiti I have ever enjoyed enough to photograph. Purely because of their lack of intelligence and general spelling skills I present to you this…

After testing my luck with the upper floors it was time to see what this hospital was known for, the glass hallway and the hydrotherapy tubs. Sneaking quietly down the stairs and over the green moss that covered the floor; the search began.

Then suddenly the dark concrete walls began to brighten, the brown puddles on the floor became less frequent, and there it was; the hallway I traveled hundreds of miles to see:

After repeating the shot that hundreds of other explores had before, the next stop was the basement… Oddly positioned between the boiler room and the medical lab was the Hydrotherapy clinic. I couldn’t quite understand why the choice was made to put this clinic in the bowls of the building. It only added to the creepiness of my surroundings. The tubs were covered in a canvas that was similar to that of a straight jacket. Its purpose was to restrain the patient as extremely cold or hot water was pumped over their body in an attempt to cure their mental demons. Only their head was exposed through a small hole at the top of the tubs. You can almost see them laying there.